February 2023 Newsletter

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter February 2023

Welcome to this month’s newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

News, Web & Blogs

Web and Publications

• Applications open for the University of Sheffield’s Open Research Prize 2023 - Deadline is 31st May. We want to recognise and celebrate the excellent work University of Sheffield researchers are doing to make their research discoverable and reusable by a wider audience. Prizes up for grabs!
• RSECon22 Q&A Extra Time - Society of Research Software Engineering - At RSECon22 last year there were a number of talks where there were additional questions that we didn’t have time for during the speaker slots. We’re very pleased that some speakers have taken the time to do a more extended Q&A with these additional questions and have written it up on the blog.
• Apply for the current round of Carpentries Maintainer Onboarding! - Applications due 1st March. - The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next cohort of Maintainers. Currently we have 109 Maintainers serving across 56 core lessons. To keep the community healthy, we need to plan for offboarding people who want to step down from their current positions and finding new people to step into the role.
• Official MathWorks MATLAB kernel for Jupyter released
• Launching Data Carpentry: Image Processing with Python - Announcing the stable release of a new curriculum teaching image processing skills. Sign up to host a workshop today!
• Tutorials on Citation File Format - In this tutorial, the cffinit v2.2.0 tool is used to create a CITATION.cff file.
• Pull request merge queue - Announcing the public beta of pull request merge queue for repos on GitHub Enterprise Cloud and open source organizations! Merge queue helps increase velocity in software delivery by automating pull request merges into your busiest branches.
• Avoiding the success trap: Toward policy for open-source software as infrastructure - This report compares open-source software (OSS) to three infrastructure systems—water management systems, capital markets, and networks of roads and bridges—and draws on existing policy vehicles from each to suggest policy that supports the sustainability and security of OSS as a communally beneficial resource.
• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? - Excellent blog detailing how ChatGPT works in simple, readable terms.
• Data access and the Online Safety Bill - The Online Safety Bill, which the government says delivers its ‘manifesto commitment to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while defending free expression’, is back in Parliament after some revision and delay. Having made it through the House of Commons, it is now at Committee Stage in the House of Lords, where peers will examine the Bill line by line.
• Advancing Software Citation Implementation (Software Citation Workshop 2022) - Software is foundationally important to scientific and social progress, however, traditional acknowledgment of the use of others’ work has not adapted in step with the rapid development and use of software in research. This report outlines a series of collaborative discussions that brought together an international group of stakeholders and experts representing many communities, forms of labor, and expertise.
• Could There Be Some Viable Challengers to Google Scholar on the Horizon?
• Want early access to our new ‘Stanage’ HPC system? - Stanage is the University’s newest HPC system. It is well suited to a variety of research workloads, including large jobs or jobs requiring GPUs. It is intended to be the logical successor to the ShARC HPC system, but is much larger. Get in touch for early access!

Events

• The Call for Proposals for DjangoCon Europe 2023 Is Now Open! - Closes 26th Febuary 2023
• The UK’s national showcase of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) - 21st and 22nd March - Hosted by The Alan Turing Institute, AI UK 2023 will be an in-depth exploration of how data science and AI can be used to solve real-world challenges.
• Open Research Conversations Next seminar is 8th March. The University Library is holding a series of Open Research Conversations throughout the spring semester. These are lunchtime online seminars featuring talks from 2-3 speakers followed by discussion. Lots of interesting stuff here!
• Digifest 2023 - 7th to 8th March - Join us - in person or online - to immerse yourself in the latest innovation in learning, teaching and assessment, leadership and culture, and research. We are still finalising our programme and will be adding more sessions in the coming weeks.
• Python GPU Programming Workshop - 9th March and 28th April 2023 - N8CIR event: Want to learn more about how to write code in Python that can take advantage of graphical processing units (GPUs)? Sign up for this two-part course introducing GPU programming through Python.
• Centre for Open Science 2023 Unconference on Open Scholarship Practices in Education Research - 9th to 10th March 2023 - The 2023 Unconference will be a virtual participation event featuring participant-led sessions analyzing the current state of open scholarship practice seeking solutions to identified problems. Participants will assess barriers to adoption of open scholarship practices unique to the education community and brainstorm strategies for promoting greater awareness.
• ShinyConf 2023 - 15-17th March, 2023, all-virtual.
• Intermediate Software Development Skills for Earth and Environmental Scientists: Reproducible Research through Reusable, Reliable Code in Python - 27th-31st March 2023, University of Manchester. Fancy improving your research techniques within the Earth, atmospheric and oceanic sciences? For any questions about the course and application, please contact Anja Le Blanc via e-mail at anja.leblanc@manchester.ac.uk.
• Reproducibility in Bioinformatics - 3rd to 5th April. - This course aims at increasing awareness and introduces strategies on how to improve reproducibility in bioinformatic analyses. Through a mixture of theoretical blocks and hands-on exercises the instructors will guide participants to develop skills to increase reproducibility of bioinformatic analyses and workflows using containers, versioning and virtual environments.
• Symposium: Perspectives on teaching reproducibility - 20th June 2023, Sheffield, UK - Reproducibility has gained a lot of attention in research and many disciplines have adopted policies recognizing the value of open scholarship. The teaching of reproducible methods has received somewhat less attention, but is no less important. Some excellent examples are documented in the November 2022 issue of Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, where a number of instructors reflect on “Teaching reproducibility and responsible workflow” and how to embed reproducible workflows, data management and transparent reporting in courses and programmes.

Training

Research IT Training

Research IT courses will be adopting a hybrid approach from March. The team will be providing their courses both online and in person for the first time since March 2020. The team provides a place for beginners or advanced users to expand their knowledge of HPC and different programming languages. The courses are part of the Doctoral Development Programme. For more information please visit our training registration web page (via VPN): crs.shef.ac.uk.

RSE Team: Git & GitHub through GitKraken workshop - from Zero to Hero!

This is an introductory course, teaching the git and GitHub skills required to manage research code over it’s development lifecycle. These skills are essential for collaborative research teams.

• Introduction to Conda for (Data) Scientists 2023-03-03
• Git & GitHub through GitKraken workshop 2023-03-06 & 2023-03-07

If a course is “sold out” please join the wait list by signing up - we regularly email people to encourage those that can no longer attend to cancel. Those on the wait list get early notification when the courses are run again.

Opportunities

Funding

• Artificial intelligence innovation to accelerate health research - Closing date: 28th March 2023 - Apply for funding to develop innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to be applied to health challenges.
• Future Leaders Fellowships: round 8 - Closing date: 4th July 2023 - Apply for funding to support ambitious research or innovation across UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) remit.
• Get up to 12 days of software engineering support for your HPC/ML/GPU project. Deadline N/A. The Research Software Engineering team is offering to support researchers with the use of High Performance Computing (HPC), Machine Learning (ML) and Graphics Processors (GPUs) in their research projects. All researchers at our University can receive up to £5,000 of support time, or roughly 12 days of support, provided by a Research Software Engineer (RSE). This call aims to increase the uptake of the University’s Tier 2 HPC resources, which are national facilities available to researchers in all faculties. This is an open call and applications are considered on a first-come-first-served basis. There is no current deadline and applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis.

LunchBytes

LunchBytes are a monthly series of short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.

LunchBytes needs YOU!

LunchBytes are organised by and for the research software community at The University of Sheffield. If you’d like to curate a session on a topic or present something, get in touch by emailing lunchbytes-organisers-group@sheffield.ac.uk - Or suggest topics on the jamboard.

Support

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to hear from you.

Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ Research IT team. They are open to anyone at TUoS writing code for research to get help with programming problems and general advice on best practices.

At each session, members of the RSE and/or Research IT teams will be available to review code, advise, troubleshoot, and suggest ways to improve your computational workflows.

Research IT HPC Drop In

HPC Drop-In sessions are providing assistance with HPC related user issues such as challenges in scaling an application from desktop to supercomputer. We are considering extending the number of our sessions to two or three weekly. These interactive sessions could provide a better interface with our users than our non-interactive ticketing system. These sessions are advertised on the HPC mailing list.

Research IT Consultations

Alongside the HPC Drop-In sessions, Research IT are also running one to one consultations to solve in depth user specific problems. These consultations can be booked via our webpage. If you are interested please visit the following link: https://students.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research.

Sheffield RSE Team

The Sheffield RSE Team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software.

They can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

The Sheffield RSE Team provides free Code Clinics (in collaboration with IT Services), plus paid services that allow us to collaborate longer term.

Research IT

Research IT directly supports research, both academic and commercial. We provide large scale HPC systems, advice on everything from statistics to ML to data pipelines and training for both students and staff. Working with academics, our staff are embedded within research groups on both long and short term engagements.